Archive for the 'PPC' Category

It can be a confusing process to find a good Search firm. If anyone has ever been to an SES or SMX show, you probably find every PPC (Pay-Per-Click) vendor says the same thing. They all say they do the same thing, and they are the best.

Many advertising agencies & corporations outsource their Paid Search (PPC) Marketing. They usually will use a PPC Consultant or a large search firm. Very often there is a RFP process that involves questions and answers.

Below, I’ve put together an organized list of questions that anyone can use when gathering information regarding a potential Paid Search partner.

Conversion Tracking:
Do you have integrated tracking across all media types and all the leading search engines worldwide?
Does your platform have the capability for Transaction tracking based on:
- Using server redirects or direct traffic?
- Unlimited types of tranactions?
- Multiple variables (Order ID, zip code, etc.)
- Organic search results

Bid Management:
Can you set up rules based bidding such as:
- Optimum Keyword Ranking
- Bid Gap Management
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA) targeting
- Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) targeting
- Day Parting Rules
- Manual bidding

Reporting:
Does your platform show both reporting and tracking data for the following criteria:
- Campaigns
- Keyword Groups
- Keywords and phrases
- PPC Search Engines
- Destination URLs
- Date Range (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly)
- Latency Reports

Please attach a sample performance report.
Can we export reports as Excel or csv?

Account Management:
Can your platform handle multiple accounts?
Are there single or separate Logins, or dropdowns for each campaign?
Is there a limit on the number of keywords per account?
How many bid reviews per day? Is there a limit?
How many people will be dedicated to our account?
How is your client services team structured?

Keyword Generation Tools:
Do you have a Keyword Research/Generation tool to suggest relevant keywords and phrases for our campaign based on our input, AND through “crawling” our website?
Do you have a Keyword tool that enables us to build large keyword lists specific to our campaigns by utilizing all potential combinations of keyword phrases?

Ad Creative:
Does your client services team write ad copy?

Testing:
Is your platform capable of handling A/B split tests?
Is your platform capable of Multivariate testing?

Portfolio Mgmt vs Keyword level:
Does your platform offer the ability to choose between a portfolio based management, and keyword level bid management?

Pricing:
How is your service priced? Is it full-service client services, or just advice for do-it-yourself?
Are there multiple pricing models?
How is your technology priced? Can your platform be licensed?
What is the pricing structure for 100 campaigns that need full-service?

International Search Feature:
Does your technology support keywords and ad creative in all languages — including Asian double-byte characters?

Competitive Differentiation:
How do you differentiate your company from the rest of the industry?

Is there such a thing as an Industry Average for CTR?

I just reviewed 12 different PPC campaigns within the Music Industry across a handful of record labels. While I can’t share any of the specific numbers, I can speak in broad terms (no pun intended).

These 12 campaigns were for different Artists. The campaign objectives ranged from direct response (selling CD, Tickets, mp3, merch, fan club acquisition, etc), to brand awareness (eg: for the Video Music Awards).

There are also times when a large Brand will use an Artist’s song in a TV commercial, and the label wants to leverage that offline event to drive traffic online, and increase artist popularity.

Each campaign has a buildout of adgroups that is similar, however, the real differences lie in the landing pages, keywords, ad copy, bids, etc. And, that as we all know, is enough to blow up the idea that there is such a thing as an industry average. It also depends how aggressively you want to optimize for CTR.

Not to mention, one artist may be hugely more popular than another upcoming artist, and that reflects in the CTR and the CPC’s.

Another important consideration is if the Content Distribution network is opted into. That will pull down the CTR’s.

Another factor in the music industry is the heavy use of Flash, and Image-rich content pages. This has an adverse affect on Quality Score and Google penalizes by increasing the minimum bids. But, there are some artist who are moving away from that model, and interacting more with their fans thru blogs….which are typically text-rich. The crawlable relevant text helps their Quality Score.

Perhaps the industry average could be just that. Just tally up the average CTR & CPC of all 12 campaigns, and that’s the industry average. But, in my opinion, it’s not accurate to compare a competitive artist, to a less popular artist. Or, a branding campaign to a direct-response campaign.

I just went thru an invoicing hell with a whole bunch of past-due invoices from Google. This was across several different accounts, that are contained within 2 MCC accounts. I was dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and the invoices were not addressed in the way to comply. As a side note, Sarbanes Oxley Compliance, “has increased costs associated with being a publicly held company by 130 percent.”

In this particular case, since they didn’t have specific “Bill To” information on the invoices, the invoices got stuck in the SOX process, and hadn’t been paid. Eventually, chargebacking was involved in a few cases just to get the invoices paid.

Alas, everything is resolved now. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience. But, thank G-d it’s resolved. Certainly at the very least, this was an interesting learning experience.

Here’s a short but sweet post that should save you time, and increase your productivity so you don’t have to go thru that same unpleasant experience I did.

Steps before you start the campaign:
Step 1: Make sure you have all the necessary approval(s).
Step 2: Remember to get PO#’s before each campaign, to be applied to each invoice/campaign.
Step 3: Make sure the account/invoices will have the correct “Bill To” information.
Step 4: Submit invoices as they are generated by Google. Google won’t necessarily have the invoice ready at the end of each month.

For those of you that manage a Google MCC Account, there’s no need to click into every single account to generate a monthly invoice. Depending on the amount of accounts you manage, this exercise could take quite a long time.

So, here’s an easier method to grab all of your monthly invoices, broken out by specific accounts.

GENERATING INVOICES:
1) Log into your MCC.
2) Click on “My Account” tab.
3) Use dropdown to select Date Range.
4) The Billing Summary will appear on the next screen sorted by Month/year.

On that screen you are given several hyperlinks from which you can grab information. The choices are consolidated (.pdf) | spreadsheet | account-level (.zip) .

I prefer to use the account-level (.zip) which contains every invoice by account for that month.

That’s it. Hopefully, this post has saved you time and energy whether you’re an SEO Consultant, Agency person, or on the client-side.

If you’re conducting a PPC campaign that is internationally geo-targeted to specific countries, then this post is for you. Especially, if you are unfamiliar with their native language.

Let’s take a PPC campaign geo-targeting Germany. Obviously you’d want to build a keyword list in German, and run it on Google.de.

First, I tried using Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. They don’t work for building a foreign language keyword list. I generated the top 1000 search terms related to the word, “music“. The german word for music is, musik. It wasn’t listed at all. As a matter of fact, no foreign language was on the list. Just try generating a German language keywords. Or, try japanese. It’s just not happening with Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker.

Which led me to use the German Google Keyword Tool (Notice the .de extension on the url). My Google team told me within the Google Keyword Tool in Adwords, the default is United States only. “If you use the geo-targeting settings, you will be able to pull keyword data for the countries that are available. If you’d like additional ideas to the keywords that you’ve inputted, this can be done by clicking on the “Use Synonyms” option.”.

However, the Google Keyword Tool doesn’t seem to work.
I went to German Google Keyword Tool and logged in with my adwords login. Type in “music”, and “Use Synonyms” option. Surprisingly, there isn’t one german language word on the list! Google will not translate the words that are generated!

So, here’s 3 methods to generate a foreign language international keyword list.

Method #1:
You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to generate foreign language keyword lists by entering a website URL into the Keyword Tool to crawl for similar words. As a test, I used http://www.musik-service.de.

Although I have to admit, I can’t speak German, so I don’t know which of those keywords I want to bid on. Even though I can’t speak German, I’m lucky that my co-worker Carmen speaks German fluently. And, besides speaking German she is my queen of Google Analytics.

Within the tool, you can see how Google automatically groups the terms into adgroups for you. I inputted this URL into the Google Tool: http://www.realbeatz.de

Method #2:
Quantcast for “Similar sites”, then use Spyfu to mine the keywords.

Method #3:
Generate your keyword list in English, then use Yahoo Babelfish to translate all the terms.

Bottomline:
I have not been able to find a Keyword Volume Tool, similar to Wordtracker for foreign language countries. But following the above methods, you should get off to a good start.

Even after you’ve built your foreign language keyword list, unless you speak the language you won’t know how to group them into adgroups. At that point, you should make a connection with somebody who speaks the foreign language fluently.

Below is some “Google Internal” data. About a year and a half ago, I asked one of my Google reps if she had Average CTR’s by Industry for Google Only. I was going thru some old files, and I found this ppt slide. It doesn’t tell me what companies were used in the accessment, and whether or not the PPC Keywords were more brand-related than generic keywords. Obviously, brand-related keywords would skew the results with higher CTR’s.

In a previous post, I discussed Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads. For example, things like position, keywords, ad copy, dynamic keyword insertion, etc. have an impact on CTR.

Campaign objectives make a difference. It depends on each advertiser’s campaign objectives. If they are Conversion-Oriented, then their Clickthrough Rates are most likely lower. Because, those are the advertisers that can have their ad in Position #7 and that’s their sweet spot for conversion rates.

As opposed to the Brand-Oriented campaign. In which case, findability is crucial to their campaign success. That means a Position-based success metric. Hence, higher CTR’s. Some of these brand campaigns use CTR as an Analytic Metric, so their is a heavy emphasis on optimizing CTR.

I was told that these are from large comprehensive PPC campaigns from industry leaders. I don’t think this can really be used as representative data for the Avg CTR for each of these industries. But, it’s interesting data anyway.

You just launched your PPC Campaign. Now what?

It’s time to follow your PPC Strategy document, and make all the day-to-day tactical executions and implementations necessary to optimize the campaign to the success metrics.

Post-Launch PPC Optimizations:
1) Daily Bid Management / Bidding Strategies.
2) A/B Split testing (Ads, Landing pages).
3) Ad optimization / Ad creation.
4) Create customized Landing pages.
5) Keyword expansion / Keyword Bucketing.
6) Search Engine Expansion & Contraction (possibly using 2nd Tier Search Engines). Consumer behavior will dictate how to manage & optimize budget allocation based on traffic/performance metrics on each search engine.
7) Measuring. Testing. Reporting.

Client Meetings/Phone Calls:
Schedule weekly “real-time” campaign status meetings to discuss campaign performance, optimizations, and recommendations. Send the proposed agenda to your client, and ask them if they would like to add anything to the list.

Sample PPC agenda:
1) Improving landing page quality.
2) Brainstorm session to discover new keywords.( 25% of all searches on Google have never been searched for before).
3) Discussion of campaign performance in relation to campaign objectives (PPC Goals).
4) Discussion of Web Analytics & Conversion Tracking.
5) Click Fraud Management / Philosophy.

Related Posts:
PPC Campaign “Kick-off” Templates.
PPC Strategy document.
How to Upload an Adwords Bulksheet.
Monthly PPC Performance Report Template.
Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads.
4 Steps To Optimize Google Adwords Content Targeting Campaigns.
Integrating PPC search ads with online display ads.
Google MCC Accounts - Generating Invoices.

Here’s a short post that’s meant to help you save time, and increase productivity.

For those of you that manage a Google MCC, there’s no need to click into every single account to generate a monthly invoice. Depending on the amount of accounts you manage, this exercise could take quite a long time.

So, here’s an easier method to grab all of your monthly invoices, broken out by specific accounts.

1) Log into your Google MCC Account.
2) Click on “My Account” tab.
3) Use dropdown to select Date Range.
4) The Billing Summary will appear on the next screen sorted by Month/year.

On that screen you are given several hyperlinks from which you can grab information. The choices are consolidated (.pdf) | spreadsheet | account-level (.zip) .

I prefer to use the account-level (.zip) which contains every invoice by account for that month.

That’s it. Hopefully, this post has saved you time and energy.

Related Posts:
Google MDS - Manager Defined Spend.
How to Upload an Adwords Bulksheet.